While automation is old as the industrial revolution, digitization greatly increased activities that could be automated. However, as you can read more on our guide on RPA tools, initial tools for automation, which includes scripts, macros and robotic process automation (RPA) bots, focus on automating simple, repetitive processes. This makes sense because most core corporate processes are quite repetitive but not repetitive enough to completely take human out of the loop with simple programming. However, as those processes are automated with the help of more programming and better RPA tools, processes that require higher level cognitive functions are next in the line for automation.

Key capabilities for cognitive automation

Natural language processing (NLP): Even basic language understanding makes it much easier to automate most customer service processes or processes involving contracts.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Despite increased digitization, a mind-bogging amount of paper is still used, especially in heavily regulated industries like healthcare or banking. Processing these paper are required to automate any process end-to-end.

Machine learning: Processes require decisions. If those decisions can not be formulated as a set of rules, machine learning solutions are required to replace human judgement with machine judgement and automate processes.

Cognitive RPA solutions by RPA ecosystem

While these are efforts by major RPA vendors to augment their bots, they are also partnering with AI focused companies like IBM and niche tech consultancy firms to provide more sophisticated automation services.

Application areas

Discovering mismatches between contracts and invoices: Deloitte explains how their team used bots with natural language processing capabilities to solve this issue.

Offering end-to-end customer service with chatbots: While chatbots are gaining popularity, their impact is limited by how deeply integrated they are into your company’s systems. For example, if they are not integrated into the legacy billing system, a customer will not be able to change her billing period through the chatbot. Cognitive automation allows building chatbots that can make changes in other systems with ease.

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